Bolivian President Evo Morales escalates the stakes in the debate over extractivism as an anti-poverty strategy.

On May 20, Bolivian President Evo Morales issued Supreme Decree 2366, opening up Bolivia’s national parks—which are protected under the Constitution as ecological reserves—to oil and gas extraction. Just two weeks later, Morales proclaimed that his on-again, off-again plan to build a highway through the TIPNIS national park and indigenous territory in the Bolivian Amazon will finally be realized.

The coincidence of these announcements was not lost on TIPNIS road opponents, who have long suspected that the advancement of oil and gas interests is a major impetus behind the road. Within the TIPNIS, four areas covering 30% of the park’s territory are subject to long-standing hydrocarbons concessions. The Securé block is virtually adjacent to the proposed road.

In fact, 11 of Bolivia’s 22 national park reserves are overlapped by existing gas and oil concessions to transnationals like Brazil’s Petrobras, Spain’s Repsol, and France’s Total. Since the “nationalization” of hydrocarbons in 2006, these companies have operated through joint ventures with YPFB, the state energy company.

Like the TIPNIS, many of these reserves are collectively titled to indigenous groups who have inhabited them for centuries, relying on their ancestral lands for subsistence. In some cases, hydrocarbons concessions cover 70-90% of the park’s territory. These parks could become virtually extinct once the contracts are operational.

While the land area conceded to gas and oil companies in Bolivia has vastly expanded under Morales—up from 7.2 million acres in 2007 to 59.3 million in 2012—activity in the national parks has been largely paralyzed due to the lack of a coherent regulatory framework for extraction—until now. Under the new Supreme Decree, permits for hydrocarbons extraction can be granted under existing or new contracts, as long as the company promises to mitigate any adverse environmental impacts, and contributes 1% of its investment towards poverty reduction and economic development in the affected area.

Critics say these measures won’t begin to compensate for the true costs of hydrocarbons exploitation, especially since the environmental and parks agencies responsible for administering them are strongly biased towards extraction. According to JorgeCampanini of the non-profit research organization CEDIB, Supreme Decree 2366 will be a "terminal sentence” for protected areas already under assault from illegal mining, deforestation, and land invasions by coca-growers.

Morales’s twin announcements highlight a central challenge and contradiction for the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) government, which has relied heavily on oil and gas extraction to finance its successful redistributive programs. This strategy has increasingly put Morales at odds with indigenous, environmental, and other civil society organizations who argue that extractivism destroys nature and communities, perpetuates dependence on transnationals, and obscures the need to develop a sustainable economic model for the future.

In contrast, the MAS government defends its extractivist and developmentalist policies as a necessary means to alleviate poverty in the present, and to create the resources for a post-extractive economy that will transition towards “communitarian socialism.” Political scientist George Gray Molina has noted that the Bolivian government’s effective take of hydrocarbons taxes and royalties, at 72%, is among the highest in Latin America.[1]

These contrasting visions crystallized in 2011-12 around the TIPNIS controversy, the most divisive conflict of Morales’s nine-year tenure. The protracted dispute ruptured the alliance of indigenous, campesino, and urban social movements that originally brought Morales to power in 2005.

Morales put the road on hold ahead of the 2014 presidential election, in favor of a well-timed government campaign to eliminate extreme poverty in the TIPNIS. He also publicly expressed regrets about the government’s flawed community consultation process. Still, he has consistently defended the road’s geopolitical importance in promoting territorial integration and regional development. Few were surprised by the project’s resurrection, especially since Morales contracted with a state company to begin construction on the initial road segment leading up to the park in 2012, with government funds.

Morales’s decision to expand the hydrocarbons frontier into Bolivia’s national parks was also not unexpected. Vice-president Alvaro García Linera offered a preview in May 2013, invoking the theme of resource nationalism to justify the policy as an “anti-imperialist strategy.” Past neoliberal governments, he argued, protected these reserves to safeguard their resources for the future benefit of foreign investors, ensuring that Bolivia would remain in a state of underdevelopment.

Since then, the government has granted new incentives for oil and gas exploration throughout Bolivia, and at least 5 new concessions in the national parks are teed up for approval. Another Supreme Decree (DS 2298), issued last March, provides for a truncated, government-dominated consultation process in conjunction with proposed hydrocarbons activities, in lieu of one that seeks the “free, prior and informed consent” of affected communities, according to their norms and procedures, as required by the Bolivian Constitution and by international accords to which Bolivia subscribes. (A multi-year effort to develop a general consulta law has apparently been abandoned, due to the government’s inability to reach consensus with indigenous and campesino organizations.)

Morales’s decision to move forward now on both the TIPNIS and hydrocarbons fronts reflects a confluence of several factors. Economically, the dramatic decline in international oil prices (which also lowers the market price of Bolivia’s gas), along with the recently documented drop in the level of Bolivia’s proven gas reserves, has created a sense of urgency to expand the hydrocarbons frontier.

With 80% of Bolivia’s gas currently exported to Brazil and Argentina, there is also a long-postponed need to expand the supply of gas for domestic uses, including industrialization. And in his recent presidential campaign, Morales promoted the vision of Bolivia as a regional energy power, promising to develop new markets for gas exports.

Politically, Morales’s landslide victory last October, with 61% of the popular vote and wins in 8 of Bolivia’s 9 departments, was based on a newly-configured alliance of rural peasants, small producers and merchants, an emerging urban indigenous entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, and elements of conservative elite sectors who have been integrated into the MAS. This coalition, which has reshaped Bolivia’s political landscape, has substantially benefited from Bolivia’s gas-fueled prosperity and provides a broad mandate for Morales’s neo-developmentalist and extractivist policies.

As for the TIPNIS, the MAS party’s first-ever triumph in the Beni department’s gubernatorial elections—albeit after the MAS-controlled electoral commission decertifiedthe popular rival opposition party 9 days before the vote—has created a newly favorable local political climate for constructing the Beni--Cochabamba road. And the MAS party’s two-thirds control of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly will assure the votes needed to repeal the inconvenient 2011 law protecting the TIPNIS as an “untouchable” zone. While the road’s design and financing sources have yet to be determined, Morales has indicated that theBinational Social Engineering Corps, a joint venture between the Bolivian and Venezuelan military, is prepared to start construction.

Just how much push-back there will be against these initiatives remains to be seen. Groups opposed to the prevailing MAS policies have been marginalized, intervened, divided, deprived of resources, and badly weakened by the Morales government in the wake of the TIPNIS conflict. And, as anthropologist Bret Gustafson has noted, an anti-extractivist position is difficult to maintain in a country where gas is viewed primarily through the lens of resource nationalism, and as a ticket to economic prosperity.

Still, TIPNIS leader Fernando Vargas, former presidential candidate for Bolivia’s Green Party, and Adolfo Chávez, leader of the lowland indigenous federation CIDOB, have announced plans for a legal challenge to Supreme Decree 2366, an international mobilization in defense of Bolivia’s national parks, and a hoped-for audience with the Pope when he visits Bolivia in July. They will need all the help they can get.

The wind chill factor measures the cold based on temperature and wind speed. The wind chill factor was 18 degrees Fahrenheit at 8:00 a.m. but dropped to a negative 14 degrees Fahrenheit by 1:00 p.m. What was the change in the wind chill factor? Should the change have been affected by the tremble of your hand when you remembered how you failed to grow the most infinitesimal portion of an inch during three years of orphanage existence? What if I told you the original human was born as an adult from a split bamboo—would that diminish the nightmares ever-clawing at your mind’s eye like the windblown branches during a recent storm? Did you hear me when I tried to soothe, “No, mi hija—they are not reaching through the glass to trade their limbs for yours…”? How many years will collapse before you turn to me one day during some unforetold moment of radical happiness—perhaps your wedding day replete with white light, white roses, white silk, white lace, all the white pearls I possess and lucid champagne?—and whisper with an unhidden note of chastisement: “Mama, glass is easily broken…”?

On May 1, 2005, at 5:27 PM, ERTABIOS@aol.com e-mails out to Filipinos in

cyberspace:

Dear All,

For a new project I'm working on, I'd be interested in knowing what would be the kind of things you or your family or Filipino acquaintances would deem important in putting into a balikbayan box. Of course the contents would differ per person/family, but I would like to see if there are some products that have wide appeal for such a

briefcases (especially the kind you get a conferences that have a sponsor's name

printed on the front)

mens' briefs

sports socks

T-shirts (this is a general gift, you send one for everyone)

toys (new and used)

low cal salad dressing

eyeglass frames (used)

This is as detailed as I can recall from 25 years of sending door-to-door boxes.

There's a technical difference between balikbayan box (which is what someone

returning to the Philippines for a visit would bring) versus a door-to-door box which is what you'd pack with goodies and have a courier pick up from your house and deliver to your family/friends (thus door-to-door). Here in Singapore, it costs just as much or even more to send a door-to-door box home as it would cost from the US. The difference is that there is a range of box sizes, the largest one costing about US$90 to send. There is NO WEIGHT LIMIT but the service suggests you include only up to 12 cans of corned beef, 2 or 3 bottles of shampoo, etc.

Date: 5/1/2005 8:03:25 PM Pacific Standard Time

From: Kathy XXX

My folks usually put things in balikbayan boxes like:

Canned salmon/lunch meat

Towels

Lotion/Shampoo/Conditioner

Old clothes

Old paperback books mom finds lying around most anywhere

Samples of perfume or the little shampoo/soaps you'd get at a hotel

Give-aways from the cosmetics counter (Clinic and Elizabeth Arden)

UNUSUAL THINGS:

Microwave (this was put on as luggage during a trip back home)

Entire set of Encyclopedia Brittanica from the 1970's

Pots and Pans

Kitchen utensils

Date: 5/1/2005 9:09:48 PM Pacific Standard Time

From: Bino A. Realuyo

my father (in n.y.) used to send them to us (in manila) every so many months, and

there was one and only one thing i looked forward to when i opened those boxes:

inhaling the escaping smell of america.

it was what i looked forward to as a child. i even wanted to live in that box so i could

smell it all day.

Date: 5/1/2005 10:00: 48 PM Pacific Standard Time

From: Eileen Tabios to Bino A. Realuyo

You remind me of a veeeeeery old lady whose "pasalubong" from my family one trip

was a small bar of soap. She wasn't a relative or anything but in our village, people

just started to stop by if there were state-side visitors so she got a small bar of soap.

She lifted it with her wrinkled hands to her wrinkled nose, and then said, "Oooooh.

Soap even smells different from America."

Date: 5/1/2005 10:11:26 PM Pacific Standard Time

From: Pearl XXX

ah, this one is a quick easy response.

toys

toys

toys

kid's clothes in like new condition

kid's movies, program video tapes

video games

Ladies clothes and shoes

handbags

dried goods food

Date: 5/1/2005 10:53:28 PM Pacific Standard Time

From: Michelle Bautista

My uncle's family went home to bring my cousin home for burial. But they still

packed stuff to bring home to distribute and some stuff to use to cook for the ensuing

24 hour wakes upon their arrival.

The garlic and sugar they could get there, but those kinds of staples are considered

expensive even relative to the dollar-peso exchange.

I remember when they took my grandmother home for burial my mother packed

similar things saying it was easier to bring it over than to buy it there.

Date: 5/1/2005 11:06:01 PM Pacific Standard Time

From: Michelle Bautista

Also, there were a couple of pieces in the “Dalagas and Tomboys” show [at

Bindlestiff Studio, San Francisco]. One shows a woman talking to her balikbayan box

and the box is talking back. She mentions how the mom wants her to bring spam

though they have it over there.

In a film, a woman talks about how she is the only one in her family to go back and

how she feels obligated to share and bring back some of the "success" her family has

had in the states.

Conversely, whenever a friend of mine comes back from the Philippines, her uncle

gave her all this hopia and milkfish to distribute to relatives here which put her over

the poundage limit. When she got back and went shopping with her mom at a

Filipino grocery store, she found the hopia and milkfish lined on the shelves.

I remember when I was little my mother often packed Nestle's Quick, cans of Folger's coffee, toothpaste, chocolate candies (m&ms, snickers), toothbrushes, Dove and Irish Spring soap bars. For an American friend now living in the Philippines, I always bring back a bottle or two of decent wine.

the contents of the balikbayan box are my way of saying to my family that I thought of them when I was choosing things to put into the box. For instance, paper towels are available in the Philippines, but my mom loves the ones that come from here, so I always include those in a box that I'll send home.

It's not so much the brand name that's important (I have a family who are not brandconscious, which helps), but it's the thought that's been put into collecting together the things that go in the box. It's also a bit like going home when I wrap up presents and label them with the names of those who are dear to me. Even though I can't see them, they are always with me in my thoughts. (It also gives me an excuse to shop ;)

When my aunt used to send us balikbayan boxes, it was always exciting to see what

she had put into it. It wasn't so much the content as the anticipation that made it

such a festive occasion.

Date: 5/2/2005 2:32:05 AM Pacific Standard Time

From: Luis Cabalquinto

books, books, & more books

new & vintage clothing

canned and bottled foods

kitchen tools & supplies

farm & garden tools

new & used toys

carpentry tools

dvd movie & game players

new & used computers

tv sets

bottled "spirits"

(My associates and I have sent all of the above at various times to relatives,

BUT THESE PRODUCTS ARE EXPENSIVE in pesos -- and it's difficult, and mostly

a showy display of our privilege, conducting colonialism discourse with folks who may not afford the luxury of colonialism discourse. and so, from our positions of American privilege, indicting their colonial mentality -- this is paternalist.

additionally, i've been told stories of some extended family members feeling

disgruntled when these items are not included in the balikbayan boxes, because they interpret the omission as our american family not sharing our american wealth, thus communicating a "we are better than you. we've forgotten about you" message to them.

the contents of the balikbayan box are my way of saying to my family that I thought of them when I was choosing things to put into the box. For instance, paper towels are available in the Philippines, but my mom loves the ones that come from here, so I always include those in a box that I'll send home.

It's not so much the brand name that's important (I have a family who are not brandconscious, which helps), but it's the thought that's been put into collecting together the things that go in the box. It's also a bit like going home when I wrap up presents and label them with the names of those who are dear to me. Even though I can't see them, they are always with me in my thoughts. (It also gives me an excuse to shop ;)

When my aunt used to send us balikbayan boxes, it was always exciting to see what

she had put into it. It wasn't so much the content as the anticipation that made it

with folks who may not afford the luxury of colonialism discourse. and so,

from our positions of american privilege, indicting their colonial mentality --

this is paternalist.

Is it Leny's question(ing), or her question's reception via this paragraph by Barbara,

that's paternalistic (via the conflation of poverty with an unwillingness to "discourse")?

Is significant change ever easy?

Is colonialism discourse a "luxury"?

[Though anytime one wants to communicate with anyone else, perhaps we should

say "chat" or "converse" rather than "discourse"....:-) ]

I'm not positing anything (yet) as I'm primarily just listening, but just raising these

questions at this paragraph that seems so all-encompassing to me of what could be a

multiplicity of responses to this issue.

Date: 5/3/2005 7:58:48 AM Pacific Standard Time

From: Annalissa Arangcon Herbert

Apologies for such a long post, but Leny's question motivated me to write:

I think Leny's point is well taken, and I was wondering the same thing as I was

reading the lists of "care packages." As a second generation child who grew up in

San Francisco, I have very ambivalent memories of the the huge balikbayan boxes

my parents would pack up to send back home every year. In particular I remember

times, when unused birthday presents, bottles of perfume, old clothes, candy old

stereo equiptment (that was old and maybe not working so well) would go into the

boxes for the trip back home. It wasn't always new stuff.

When as I child I questioned my mother why half my closet and most of my birthday

toys would get packed into the boxes for these unseen relatives, my mother would

chide me for being "selfish" and tell me that I was "spoiled" since I was living in the

United States and didn't understand how difficult it was for the people back home. It

seemed to me though, that our relatives back home were less interested in the

material things (of course it was fun to open

up the boxes and give away free stuff and play Santa Claus) and always more

interested in the interpersonal stuff, i.e. Just come home yourself! we miss you! My

how big your daughter has grown send us pictures, call us and tell us how you are

doing etc...

On my recent trips to the Philippines, especially in the last few years (I last went

home this past December for a wedding) my mother packed up most of my carry-ons with tons of the usual stuff, out grown clothes, perfume, US candy, assorted watches etc, a laptop for my cousin. My aunt and her family's response to the presents, was actually one of distaste, Why did you bother bringing all that stuff here? We can buy that here already! She told me we really are more interested in spending time with you and hearing the family news. I got the sense that I was reinscribing a sense of colonial inferiority in them. There I was, the U.S. based relative bringing in the left over "treasures" from the 1st world and they were feeling pressure to reciprocrate in equal material goods, but were facing the economic reality that they couldn't and that irritated my aunt. They kept on insisting on taking me out and offering to pay for books I was buying for my research in order to reciprocrate the stuff I brought them.

Even though my mother's intentions in making me bring all that stuff were motiviated out of love, it reminded me that no one wants to be reminded that they are poor.

i think this balikbayan box has many, many sides, depending who sends it, and who

is on the receiving end.

when my father left manila in the late 70s, he was terminally ill. the rest of us, my

mother and two siblings, had no idea of his fate in america. my brother and i were

young boys, and my sister a teen. a few months after my dad left, the balikbayan

boxes started to come in.

for me, at that age, it was very simple. opening that box, inhaling the smell that was

hidden inside, was the tight embrace of an absent father whom i might never see

again. for many years, my early teens, i was reared by my father through the boxes

and letters he sent home to manila. i would not see him until the rest of my family

moved here and reunite with my still sick father. by then, it was too late to replace

the box with a real man. i have since learned to live with the metaphors that life has

thrown at me.

in my family, that box was more than a box, the contents more that its tangible parts.

it was a raison d'etre, a bridge between worlds, between decades of history, between young sons and a dying father, a figurative "galleon-trade" between manila and new york, a somewhat economic upgrade, a stateside pride that i carried in the streets of manila (a weapon). it was a war-torn man's parenting style reinvented in a form of a box.

"colonialism" is a very easy label. perhaps it's truly time to think outside the "box" of

these limiting concepts.

perhaps the question is not always what was in the box, but what happened when it

was opened on the other side. what happened on my side was simply the story of

my young life.

i used to say, my father was a balikbayan box.

anak ng kahon,

anak ng kahon= son of a box. :-)

Date: 5/3/2005 11:54:41 AM Pacific Standard Time

From: Michelle Bautista

In Lolan Sevilla's piece on the balikbayan box in the "Dalagas and Tomboys" show,

she discusses with the box the problematic issue of the contents of the box.

Do the contents of brand name clothes that are originally made in Asia simply

helping to perpetuate the economic poverty of the region in supporting "sweatshop"

created clothing? And how these same brand name products have bad labor and

environmental practices that destroy the country and culture they are in. How the

Also, how often Filipinos here will max out their credit card to desperately fill this box, essentially going into a bit of poverty themselves.

In the scene, she comes to terms with the fact that as part of her family obligation she will have to bring this box, but takes care of the last few pounds by including books, like "Asata" and "Making Waves", as well as some "t-shirts from the youth event" she organized and perhaps a few letters to her family about her life here.

My family still brings this stuff back, mostly because it's still difficult to travel all the

way to the supermarket and back with these items, and as a way of controlling how

much they buy and spend. They do just give money, but at the same time, they

worry that the money they give may not be used on the things that had been

intended.

My aunt gave money to her sister-in-law who had been diagnosed with cancer for

treatment. however, her sister-in-law could not spend so much money just on

herself, so used the money to buy "things" for her family members. in another family

money sent for the schooling of their kids was used for something else.

There's also I think this thing about how Filipinos show their "love". And that Filipinos tend to give a "thing" to show how much they care. In a Swedish film based on the work of Rhacel Parrenas on overseas contract workers, a child whose mother works abroad is asked how his mother shows her love for him. He points to his large shiny watch.

The balikbayan box tells Lolan, "I know the gifts I bear can be problematic, but what

would make it better? All I can say is that you're asking the right questions."

Date: 5/3/2005 4:50:50 PM Pacific Standard Time

From: Eileen Tabios

Dear All,

I want to thank everyone who's participated in providing balikbayan lists, as well as in terms of discussing their implications. I'm not writing this email to suggest that the dialogue can now stop. It's just that I'm about to go offline until possibly next Monday because of a trip to New York tomorrow (if anyone is in CUNY La-Guardia tomorrow in Queens, I'm doing a reading/panel from noon to 2 p.m. at Room M106, dealing with "borrowed tongue" and costumbrismo).

If folks continue to discuss this online (perhaps in response to this email), I will be

online until tomorrow morning but in any event will pick up reading them again on

Sunday evening.

I will still need to get back with a comprehensive overall list of what my "survey"

uncovered. But, in gratitude for your help, I want to share more about this "shopping project" I'm developing. What I'm doing now is writing a poetic autobiography based on shopping lists. Its working title is COMMODITIES: Poem, Installation Art, Novel and Autobiography

If you take a look -- as I have been -- at your shopping lists, they inevitably reveal

something about your life. Some weeks back, while going about my daily business

that included buying this and that item, I realized that my current shopping lists reveal much about my daily activities but very little about how I came to be the kind of person engaged in those daily activities. So, I'm writing an autobiography based on shopping lists throughout my life. (So the project is not limited to the balikbayan box content list but will be based on many types of shopping lists and shoppings.)

So interspersed with a set of shopping lists as they occur in realtime (today), will be

shopping in preparation for our departure from the Philippines. "I want to be

sure," she said, "we don't forget where we came from."

We were scheduled to leave for the United States in early 1970. Some of the

items from my mother’s 1969 Immigration Shopping List:

decorative boxes formed by capiz shells

handwoven placemats and tablecloths

farmers’ rattan hats that she envisioned hanging up against our future

American kitchen walls

wood carvings of carabao, pigs, chickens and other animals by Igorot

tribesmen

rosaries

a bedspread illustrated with a sewn map of the Philippine archipelago

two dozen Barong Tagalogs in various sizes that she anticipated my

brothers growing into

a wood and brass plaque depicting various types of Filipino swords

sofa pillow covers with handstitched images of Philippine flowers:

Benguet Lily, Bougainvillea, Gumamela, Ilang-Ilang, Jade Vine,

Kalachuchi, Kamie, Sampaguita, Santan, and Waling-Waling

bamboo-framed watercolors of various rice terrace scenes

At the airport, we discovered the items exceeded the weight of free baggage

allowed by the airline. My mother stiffened her spine, and began giving them

away to the relatives who had come to see us off.

To my secret relief as I coveted it, she did manage to pack a purse made from

shellacked coconut shells.

But at the other side of the plane trip, when we were met by my father and a few

U.S.-based relatives we'd never met before, she took out the purse and gave it

as a gift to Auntie C.

The fat auntie noticed my dismay but accepted it anyway. Later, she gave me a

pink, fluffy sweater. But I hated it as I suspected it was a discard from her

daughter's closet.

I was ten years old.

Date: 5/4/2005 8:02:42 AM Pacific Standard Time

From: lenystrobel@sbcglobal.net

"Colonialism" is a very easy label. perhaps it's truly time to think outside the "box" of these limiting concepts.

I am interested in pursuing this line of thinking as I think it's important, (to me), how we understand what we mean by "colonialism as a box" that we need to think outside of. So I would like to pose these questions to the group.

1. Is colonialism over? Why isn't it a relevant concept anymore?

2. How does paternalism show up in the way we deal with the balikbayan box

practice?

3. What is outside the box of colonialism?

4. If our individual stories constitute the narrative of the nation, what do our personal balikbayan box lists and stories say about us as a nation and a people?

5. When does colonial discourse become a luxury? For whom?

6. In considering the balikbayan box practice, how do we distinguish between

colonial paternalism and the Filipino practice of pasalubong (which has deep cultural implications) as we pack and unpack its contents?

My interest in the above questions is a part of my curiosity as a someone who

23.06.2015

A friend recently told me that when she gave birth to her son, before naming him, before even nursing him, her first thought was, I have to get him out of this country. We both laughed. Perhaps our black humor had to do with understanding that getting out was neither an option nor the real desire. This is it, our life. Here we work, hold citizenship, pensions, health insurance, family, friends and on and on. She couldn’t, she didn’t leave. Years after his birth, whenever her son steps out of their home, her status as the mother of a living human being remains as precarious as ever. Added to the natural fears of every parent facing the randomness of life is this other knowledge of the ways in which institutional racism works in our country. Ours was the laughter of vulnerability, fear, recognition and an absurd stuckness.

I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. “The condition of black life is one of mourning,” she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.

Photo

Mourners at Emmett Till's funeral after his death by lynching. His mother insisted on an open coffin and a public viewing, which drew tens of thousands.CreditChicago Tribune/Associated Press

Eleven days after I was born, on Sept. 15, 1963, four black girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Now, 52 years later, six black women and three black men have been shot to death while at a Bible-study meeting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. They were killed by a homegrown terrorist, self-identifed as a white supremacist, who might also be a “disturbed young man” (as various news outlets have described him). It has been reported that a black woman and her 5-year-old granddaughter survived the shooting by playing dead. They are two of the three survivors of the attack. The white family of the suspect says that for them this is a difficult time. This is indisputable. But for African-American families, this living in a state of mourning and fear remains commonplace.

The spectacle of the shooting suggests an event out of time, as if the killing of black people with white-supremacist justification interrupts anything other than regular television programming. But Dylann Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He has grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism. He has seen white men like Benjamin F. Haskell, Thomas Gleason and Michael Jacques plead guilty to, or be convicted of, burning Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Mass., just hours after President Obama was elected. Every racist statement he has made he could have heard all his life. He, along with the rest of us, has been living with slain black bodies.

We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against. When blacks become overwhelmed by our culture’s disorder and protest (ultimately to our own detriment, because protest gives the police justification to militarize, as they did in Ferguson), the wrongheaded question that is asked is, What kind of savages are we? Rather than, What kind of country do we live in?

In 1955, when Emmett Till’s mutilated and bloated body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River and placed for burial in a nailed-shut pine box, his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, demanded his body be transported from Mississippi, where Till had been visiting relatives, to his home in Chicago. Once the Chicago funeral home received the body, she made a decision that would create a new pathway for how to think about a lynched body. She requested an open coffin and allowed photographs to be taken and published of her dead son’s disfigured body.

Mobley’s refusal to keep private grief private allowed a body that meant nothing to the criminal-justice system to stand as evidence. By placing both herself and her son’s corpse in positions of refusal relative to the etiquette of grief, she “disidentified” with the tradition of the lynched figure left out in public view as a warning to the black community, thereby using the lynching tradition against itself. The spectacle of the black body, in her hands, publicized the injustice mapped onto her son’s corpse. “Let the people see what I see,” she said, adding, “I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me.”

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A memorial for Eric Garner near where he died after he was taken into police custody on Staten Island on July 17, 2014.CreditSpencer Platt/Getty Images

It’s very unlikely that her belief in a national mourning was fully realized, but her desire to make mourning enter our day-to-day world was a new kind of logic. In refusing to look away from the flesh of our domestic murders, by insisting we look with her upon the dead, she reframed mourning as a method of acknowledgment that helped energize the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.

The decision not to release photos of the crime scene in Charleston, perhaps out of deference to the families of the dead, doesn’t forestall our mourning. But in doing so, the bodies that demonstrate all too tragically that “black skin is not a weapon” (as one protest poster read last year) are turned into an abstraction. It’s one thing to imagine nine black bodies bleeding out on a church floor, and another thing to see it. The lack of visual evidence remains in contrast to what we saw in Ferguson, where the police, in their refusal to move Michael Brown’s body, perhaps unknowingly continued where Till’s mother left off.

After Brown was shot six times, twice in the head, his body was left facedown in the street by the police officers. Whatever their reasoning, by not moving Brown’s corpse for four hours after his shooting, the police made mourning his death part of what it meant to take in the details of his story. No one could consider the facts of Michael Brown’s interaction with the Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson without also thinking of the bullet-riddled body bleeding on the asphalt. It would be a mistake to presume that everyone who saw the image mourned Brown, but once exposed to it, a person had to decide whether his dead black body mattered enough to be mourned. (Another option, of course, is that it becomes a spectacle for white pornography: the dead body as an object that satisfies an illicit desire. Perhaps this is where Dylann Storm Roof stepped in.)

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experiences of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens.

The American tendency to normalize situations by centralizing whiteness was consciously or unconsciously demonstrated again when certain whites, like the president of Smith College, sought to alter the language of “Black Lives Matter” to “All Lives Matter.” What on its surface was intended to be interpreted as a humanist move — “aren’t we all just people here?” — didn’t take into account a system inured to black corpses in our public spaces. When the judge in the Charleston bond hearing for Dylann Storm Roof called for support of Roof’s family, it was also a subtle shift away from valuing the black body in our time of deep despair.

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March 2015: Visitors at a memorial for Michael Brown outside the Canfield Green apartments in Ferguson, Mo., where he was shot and killed by a police officer last August.CreditScott Olson/Getty Images

Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. The unarmed, slain black bodies in public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time, even if locally things appear normal. Having coffee, walking the dog, reading the paper, taking the elevator to the office, dropping the kids off at school: All of this good life is surrounded by the ambient feeling that at any given moment, a black person is being killed in the street or in his home by the armed hatred of a fellow American.

The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us. If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered, if we were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us. Our deaths inside a system of racism existed before we were born. The legacy of black bodies as property and subsequently three-fifths human continues to pollute the white imagination. To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but also grasp it. In thewords of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, “The problem is we have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.” And, as my friend the critic and poet Fred Moten has written: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world and I want to be in that.” This other world, that world, would presumably be one where black living matters. But we can’t get there without fully recognizing what is here.

Dylann Storm Roof’s unmediated hatred of black people; Black Lives Matter; citizens’ videotaping the killings of blacks; the Ferguson Police Department leaving Brown’s body in the street — all these actions support Mamie Till Mobley’s belief that we need to see or hear the truth. We need the truth of how the bodies died to interrupt the course of normal life. But if keeping the dead at the forefront of our consciousness is crucial for our body politic, what of the families of the dead? How must it feel to a family member for the deceased to be more important as evidence than as an individual to be buried and laid to rest?

Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, was kept away from her son’s body because it was evidence. She was denied the rights of a mother, a sad fact reminiscent of pre-Civil War times, when as a slave she would have had no legal claim to her offspring. McSpadden learned of her new identity as a mother of a dead son from bystanders: “There were some girls down there had recorded the whole thing,” she told reporters. One girl, she said, “showed me a picture on her phone. She said, ‘Isn’t that your son?’ I just bawled even harder. Just to see that, my son lying there lifeless, for no apparent reason.” Circling the perimeter around her son’s body, McSpadden tried to disperse the crowd: “All I want them to do is pick up my baby.”

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A vigil at the Morris Brown A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 18. A gunman killed nine people in the nearby Emanuel A.M.E. Church on June 17. CreditTravis Dove for The New York Times

McSpadden, unlike Mamie Till Mobley, seemed to have little desire to expose her son’s corpse to the media. Her son was not an orphan body for everyone to look upon. She wanted him covered and removed from sight. He belonged to her, her baby. After Brown’s corpse was finally taken away, two weeks passed before his family was able to see him. This loss of control and authority might explain why after Brown’s death, McSpadden was supposedly in the precarious position of accosting vendors selling T-shirts that demanded justice for Michael Brown that used her son’s name. Not only were the procedures around her son’s corpse out of her hands; his name had been commoditized and assimilated into our modes of capitalism.

Some of McSpadden’s neighbors in Ferguson also wanted to create distance between themselves and the public life of Brown’s death. They did not need a constant reminder of the ways black bodies don’t matter to law-enforcement officers in their neighborhood. By the request of the community, the original makeshift memorial — with flowers, pictures, notes and teddy bears — was finally removed by Brown’s father on what would have been his birthday and replaced by an official plaque installed on the sidewalk next to where Brown died. The permanent reminder can be engaged or stepped over, depending on the pedestrian’s desires.

In order to be away from the site of the murder of her son, Tamir Rice, Samaria moved out of her Cleveland home and into a homeless shelter. (Her family eventually relocated her.) “The whole world has seen the same video like I’ve seen,” she said about Tamir’s being shot by a police officer. The video, which was played and replayed in the media, documented the two seconds it took the police to arrive and shoot; the two seconds that marked the end of her son’s life and that became a document to be examined by everyone. It’s possible this shared scrutiny explains why the police held his 12-year-old body for six months after his death. Everyone could see what the police would have to explain away. The justice system wasn’t able to do it, and a judge found probable cause to charge the officer who shot Rice with murder. Meanwhile, for Samaria Rice, her unburied son’s memory made her neighborhood unbearable.

Regardless of the wishes of these mothers — mothers of men like Brown, John Crawford III or Eric Garner, and also mothers of women and girls like Rekia Boyd and Aiyana Stanley-Jones, each of whom was killed by the police — their children’s deaths will remain within the public discourse. For those who believe the same behavior that got them killed if exhibited by a white man or boy would not have ended his life, the subsequent failure to indict or convict the police officers involved in these various cases requires that public mourning continue and remain present indefinitely. “I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back,” Toni Morrison said in April. She went on to say: “I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’ I will say yes.” Morrison is right to suggest that this action would signal change, but the real change needs to be a rerouting of interior belief. It’s an individual challenge that needs to happen before any action by a political justice system would signify true societal change.

The Charleston murders alerted us to the reality that a system so steeped in anti-black racism means that on any given day it can be open season on any black person — old or young, man, woman or child. There exists no equivalent reality for white Americans. The Confederate battle flag continues to fly at South Carolina’s statehouse as a reminder of a history marked by lynched black bodies. We can distance ourselves from this fact until the next horrific killing, but we won’t be able to outrun it. History’s authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.

A sustained state of national mourning for black lives is called for in order to point to the undeniability of their devaluation. The hope is that recognition will break a momentum that laws haven’t altered. Susie Jackson; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; DePayne Middleton-Doctor; Ethel Lee Lance; the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr.; the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney; Cynthia Hurd; Tywanza Sanders and Myra Thompson were murdered because they were black. It’s extraordinary how ordinary our grief sits inside this fact. One friend said, “I am so afraid, every day.” Her son’s childhood feels impossible, because he will have to be — has to be — so much more careful. Our mourning, this mourning, is in time with our lives. There is no life outside of our reality here. Is this something that can be seen and known by parents of white children? This is the question that nags me. National mourning, as advocated by Black Lives Matter, is a mode of intervention and interruption that might itself be assimilated into the category of public annoyance. This is altogether possible; but also possible is the recognition that it’s a lack of feeling for another that is our problem. Grief, then, for these deceased others might align some of us, for the first time, with the living.

Terrorism, at least in our national imagination, springs from an ideology of insurgence. Terrorism is radical. It seeks to upset and overturn a society, and to shake it to its foundations. But in America, there are few ideologies less insurgent than the doctrine of white supremacy.

On Thursday night, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart – perhaps the closest thing there is to the voice of liberal white America’s collective conscience –unqualifiedly declared the shooting an act of terrorism and skewered “the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves.” Stewart is right, of course: if Roof had brown skin and a Muslim-sounding name, there would be no national conversation about just what to call the Charleston shootings.

Roof’s alleged acts were, by all indications, driven by a violent and extremist interpretation of an ideology that is as old as America itself. The murder of nine innocent black people because of their race doesn’t cut against the American grain in the same way that the spectre of Islamist terrorism does – it rides the grain all the way to its logical conclusion.

Roof’s reportedly declared motivation – that black people “rape our women” and are “taking over our country” – are some of the most durable rhetorical pillars of America’s centuries-long entanglement with the doctrine of white supremacy. After emancipation and the end of the American civil war, the competing mythic caricatures of the black male as a violent rapacious “buck” or a docile “sambo” collapsed violently into the former. The lynching era, which claimed thousands of black lives, was predicated predominantly on the notion that white femininity needed to be protected from the threat of hypersexual black males.

And during reconstruction as blacks struggled to gain and use the franchise, whites began to feel keenly the political implications of having outnumbered themselves with human chattel property. Nowhere was this more true than South Carolina, where blacks made up 57% of the population, according to the 1860 US census. Charleston was one of several southern cities – New Orleans, Norfolk and Atlanta were others – where throughout the 1860s, threatened by the prospect of becoming a minority to an “inferior” black population, whites rioted and invaded black neighborhoods to attack men, women and children. Only in the largest incidents have history books even bothered to record the damage, like the 48 murdered and 166 injured in New Orleans in 1866.

That same year, when a band of whites killed 46 black people in Memphis, the Memphis Avalanche opined that, “the late riots in our city have satisfied one thing: that southern men will not be ruled by the negro … The negroes now know, to their sorrow, that it is best not to arouse the fury of the white man.”

It’s unknown, as yet, whether Dylann Roof planned his attack to coincide with the 193rd anniversary of Denmark Vesey’s failed 1822 slave revolt in Charleston, or with Juneteenth (the celebration, on 19 June, of the emancipation of America’s last enslaved people), or if both are a mere coincidence. Vesey’s role in founding the Emanuel AME church, certainly seems to hint at a connection with the former. What we can tell from the patches on his jacket celebrating apartheid in South Africa and the minority-white ruled, defunct state of Rhodesia, is that Roof clearly felt some connection to a time and place in which white power over black people was near-total and understood as natural. He may have felt that the wholesale slaughter of nine black people was the way to act on that feeling; he allegedly intended to use that slaughter to start a larger war.

That’s terrorism any way you slice it – but in the long view of American history, it’s certainly not insurgent, revolutionary or new. Using the word “terrorism” to describe violence exclusively against America’s non-white people is a historical first, but the terror visited exclusively upon America’s non-white people is not.

20.06.2015

We work too hard
We’re too tired
to fall in love.
Therefore we must
overthrow the government.

We work too hard
We’re too tired
to overthrow the government.
Therefore we must
fall in love.

— Rod Smith

The next day Koki and Demented Panda returned to the small plot of land. They sat together in the smoldering ash and raw sewage that their spells and spills and flesh-guns had brought about, surveying the wreckage. They had walked to the small plot of land from their homes in their two different cities to be together, not together in their separateness, but together, really together.

They had first come to the small plot of land so as to feel the collective possibility of two people coming together and writing with one hand. And they came to it now with the same desire, even though they had ongoing trouble in their coming together. Their collaboration was clearly not working and had not been working from the very beginning.

They had fought a lot about this, how to get themselves out of what they had taken to calling the impasse, which was their inability to figure out why they continued to write poetry in a time when poetry seemed not to matter, and when their attempts to collaborate with one or maybe two or maybe four hands in order to break through this impasse continued to fail. They had said to each other that they didn’t want to write any more poems that demonstrated their adept use of irony and book smarts to communicate their knowing superiority to capitalism. And they didn’t want to write any more poems that narrated their pseudoedgy sexual exploits in a way to suggest that such exploits were somehow in and of themselves political. And they didn’t want to write any more poems that made people feel sad or guilty or go oh no. But still, it was hard for them to figure out what to do with poetry in a time when 19.5 acres were required to sustain their first-world lifestyles, not to mention that within the 19.5 acres were the deaths and devastation from the mining, oil, natural gas, and nuclear industries, the deaths and torture from the policies of their government, the rising acidity of the ocean, the effects of climate change on populations without access to the equivalent of 19.5 acres of resources. And rather than provoking in them the desire to write more poems, this sense of futility, further aggravating their anger and shame, instead infected them, manifesting in all variety of ailments and effects. As a result, they would begin to tremble and shake, minuscule tremors rippling out from their enteric nervous systems and through the fibers in their organ meat, or coursing through their bloodstream and their compromised immune systems and out into the world beyond their bodies, the pent-up frustration and rage slowly seeping out of them, awkwardly, publicly, ineffectually.

And so there they were, back on the small plot of land and they decided that, as good Bay Area poets, they would of course attempt to enter into a trance state together and through this trance they hoped they might move from the places of worry and overthinking in their birdbrains and panda skulls to some kind of right proper political thinking and feeling and action, move beyond the many impasses that so defined them, defined their relationships with others, defined their lives as poets.

They had brought their yoga mats with them and so they lay down on their mats and closed their eyes and breathed in all that was there, the smoky air, the charred plastics and the metals, the sewage and the stink, but also the faint smells of rosemary and the wet sidewalk, and the sweet, metallic gasoline fumes, all of it there in the soft breeze that ever-so-lightly tickled the hairs on Demented Panda’s paws and ever-so-gently ruffled Koki’s feathers. As they lay there, eyes closed, together and yet not touching, they heard the cars continue to drive by, the heavy rail public rapid transit system careening through, people continuing to walk by on their way to more hospitable places, pushing strollers or walking their dogs or talking on their cellphones. There on their yoga mats, Demented Panda and Koki took deep breaths and noticed their breastplates rising and falling as they relaxed their bodies into the ground. And with each breath, they dropped into being relaxed, bright, and natural, dropped into being with the small plot of land, with all its still-smoldering trash and rot as well as its regenerative energies and systems. As they became increasingly relaxed, bright, and natural, they counted the cars as they heard them drive by, not as bits of data but as bodily felt. And they heard the high-pitched screeching of the heavy rail public rapid transit system careening through, not as a source of anxiety but as something simply there, a melodic fact that made their arms and legs become even more relaxed. And they tuned into each person as they walked by, noticed how all of them were breathing in and out just as they were breathing in and out. And eventually they began to think about how they were a part of the cars and the heavy rail public rapid transit system and the people walking by and the kids in strollers and dogs on leashes and people on the other sides of the cellphone conversations as much as they were a part of themselves and of each other.

And though they also knew burning, knew crumpled bags of Frito-Lay corn chips drifting through the air, knew sacks pulled out of one’s pants or pulled down over one’s head, knew bending their torsos at 90-degree angles, knew holding out their arms to be strength tested, and though they knew desire, raw and furious, knew how to put one finger in the cold gin and swirl the ice cubes while putting another finger in the warm soup to check for taste while using yet one more finger to rub vigorously back and forth and then push Send, right then all they needed to know was this breathing. And though they could feel resistance and skepticism and doubt inside themselves as they thought about their collaboration and how much of it was done in isolation from some greater collective purpose, or how it often seemed so focused on the I, I, I of their individual selves and their self-styled pseudoheroic lifestyles, seemed so focused on the I, I, I of yet more autobiography, memoir, bourgeois individualist lyricism, and North American navel-gazing, and though their shame and embarrassment at this threatened to only refortify the impasses they’d pledged to overcome, right then all they needed to know was this breathing.

And though, as a potential side effect of their working together in this way, they might very well later find themselves renally excreting 60 percent of the collaboration, with the additional 40 percent excreted in their feces, nonetheless when they got up from collaborating, they would remember to get up slowly to minimize falls, and that would be okay, as indeed they then mindfully stood up and brushed themselves off, still breathing deeply, feeling now bright and fevered, buzzing for the hive, for ever-broader interactions and barters, ever-more lateral routes to touching and adjacency, attached by suckers to each other, and ready now to move through the world with a tenfold increase in interest in it.

And so then they turned to each other in their trance state and to each other that was not them, in whatever bodies or genders they had at that moment, with feet spread slightly wider than their shoulders and pressed firmly into the ground, nostrils flaring and upper lips slightly snarled, they breathed even more deeply and proclaimed, to each other and to each other other and to all the willing monsters, to the friends and lovers and exlovers and frenemies, some at the bar and some at the staff meeting, some in the streets and some on the organizing committees, to the crooked and the bent, the oversexed and the underemployed, to the gin-soaked cynics and the beautiful losers, to the viruses and the parasites thriving within them, and with ever-growing intensity to the gathering hive buzzing there now amidst the glitter and ash, they spoke as one and declared, with tenfold determination, together and to each other, let us come together now, let’s now let’s, let us show the animal we all have within us, the one that bucks for peace and fucking, and then let that provoke us to brandish our pirate flags and set to it. Let’s clear the fields of all that hinders and hounds us, declare all contracts made in our name but without our consent null and void and charter illicit transport for all those who crave elsewhere and otherwise. What comes out of us comes out of all of us, which is why we want to dance in the common sluice without shame or hesitation, for we have wasps planted in us and want together to grow monstrous side branches that topple the stalk of you and us, so we might together bend the sound of poems and anti-poems beyond the fenced horizon, and let us sing to those who’ve yet to join us, hold high your bandaged wrists and ankles and we will show you our boils and blisters in sympathy and solidarity, in mutual recognition and misrecognition and in mutating symbiosis. And those whom we’ve yet to join, that larger us that we hope will gather two mediocre yet willing poets into its folds, sing to us, c’mon feel the noise, so that our chakras might resonate in the often fraught and contradictory yet purposeful ache of our numbers, so we might hold high our saddle-stitched chapbooks and show you our imitation-leather chaps, made from the repurposed vinyl of a thousand punk-rock LPs, framing our beatific multi-generational and diversely gravitational asses for consensual fondling or tickling or playful spanking. And from this call-and-response we will f ind ourselves abuzz with a potency that fills the air with the scent of sex and rutting, of skin-sap and untold side effects. Look, there are bears on the balconies, lapping honey off the rims of their whiskey glasses, so let’s raise our paws and wings and whoop and whistle freely with them until those more attuned to the tremors within our collective flesh-heat begin to feverishly exclaim, here come the horses, let us go out to get the giddyup, go out and meet the push-back with the head-on fortitude of the you and the we in this growing us, with nothing but poems and lust on our lips, declaring passion, fury, and fight. And we will insist that these poems, those that pun on the word capitalism and those that celebrate domestic love as labor worth slant-rhyming for, those that seem to celebrate with whatever degree of irony our daily lives and lacks, and those that value the kinds of prosodic craft that one can only be trained in at the pricey Master of Flatulent Arts programs, those that construct elaborate sociopolitical walls to bang one’s head against and gather up the resulting splinters and sparks into fragmented sound poems, and those that collect the thick idiolects of Internet culture and from this compost heap harvest uncanny confessionalisms, we will take these and all other poems inside us. We will tear them into a thousand tiny shreds and then eat those shreds and shit them out and from the excrement make new poems or anti-poems. Right now, we are pouring the whiskeys to wash them down with while we then prepare ourselves to receive the riches from your lovely assholes, regardless of age or cleanliness, since as we love you all we are ready to get down in it, for the pleasures to be found in the rich, heady aromas of shit and stink and poetry and love are the pleasures that will fuel any revolt worth getting on our knees for. And if you’d rather take the poems and roll joints filled with medicinal marijuana and other herbal remedies, then fine, we will commence with baking fair-trade vegan munchies while reminding the legume intolerant among us to beware the soy-based inks used to print our poems on the 100 percent-recycled postconsumer waste paper, ’cuz that’s how we roll. At the very least we will be happy soldiers to know that poetry might yet have helped nourish entire regiments of lovers, poems in the lungs and guts, knowing that at least in the bodies of those of us willing to masticate and swallow, inhale and ingest, somehow poetry will have mattered. And if a fungus appears, we will feed it freshly cut plant material and keep it free from mold and from that make special structures that we might call gongylidia and upon these cultivate a bacterium that grows on us and grows on you and secretes chemicals that will seep out of our pores and holes, which we will then collect in small tinctures to use as preemptive remedies against the coming crackdowns. And yes, the crackdowns are coming, and as we’ve wet our whistles and tuned our chakras and written the show tunes, let’s get on with goddamn show. When they send in the wolves, we will join the wolves and return with teeth sharper and blood hotter. And when they slice off our tentacles, we will mutate, each sucker writhing outward in tenfold directions. And then after we grow another tentacle, and cultivate yet more fungus. Do not doubt for a moment that we will join the colts and blend in with the galloping menagerie of you horses and riders, you poets and pirates, you masked brigades and brass-band misfits, you feral cats and you feral grad students. So let’s get to it together and clear the streets of cars and billboards and Christmas lights and past-due-bill notices, discovering in every intersection a dance floor, pulsing with unleashed beats and feedback loops of crooked laughter, chicka-chicka-chicken- ha-ha, chicka-chicken-ha, in harmony or disharmony, from each according to their skillz and to each according to their booty. All this with hunger in our hips, such palpable lust not for bodies but for together and for whatever might yet quiver beyond the law. And if we need to stop and catch our breath, because comrades, some of us are creaky in the knees and cranky in the brain meat and riddled with energy-sucking viruses and shy to be seen experiencing even a brief moment of shame-free and seemingly directionless joy since we tend to tell ourselves that despite all this we will probably still end up back in our offices, alone and in isolation, banging our heads on our desks, even then, as we taste the doubt and cynicism creeping up the back of our dried-out throats, we hope there will be strangers among us who will still, despite our bad breath and our sagging bellies, our genital cheese and graying pubes, touch us lightly from behind and then turn us around and kiss us passionately but without imposition, with or without eye contact, the saliva on our tongues transmitting surplus electrolytes and pheromones, recharging us for the fight. For when they pen us in the enclosures, we will need to have already become a coven of women, a coven that includes those with penises and those with cunts and those with both, who will have begun to dismantle the blockades and the fences, salvaging the metals to later meld into slugs to get into the public pay-toilets, because while what women working together can accomplish is unlimited, our bladders are not, and pants down in the rise up isn’t only for sexy time. And through all of this we will have been holding hands together and refusing, even though we might realize we are doomed to have failed for many centuries to come, still we want to come together and do this, again and again, just as yes, we write again and again another poem full of anarchist one-liners. And when we see the yellow-sick wastewater leaking through the cracks and holes in the reinforced concrete bunker walls, we will stick out our thumbs not to plug the holes but to use our talon claws, freshly manicured in a worker-owned avant-garde salon, to scrape and tear at the cracks, screeching in fake witch voices, let it come down, let it come down. Thusly woman-identified, with numbers at the ready, we will collect the overflow and after using it to freshen our slits and creases, toiling and troubling, we will agitate and spit it back, boiling and bubbling. And we will share the pain when it comes, for it will come, even as it comes unevenly and more forcefully upon some more than others, and we will let this so-called brain disorder they want to cure us of, the one that provokes us to hit authority figures and show up late for meetings, multiply in our mucous membranes and from there pass through each writhing sucker, spitting ink and oozing cold jelly, nerve-charged contact jam spread all over our hot buns of steely resolve, working our core strength at the ice-rink and saying to one another, dayum, let’s hook up and overthrow the government. And then, reeking of sex and machine grease and full of each other’s cold jellies, we will wipe our hands over the sweat-stained yoga mats and make of our fluids and your skin and your fluids and our skin the most powerful of potions, the musk of multitudes, and with our tongues in your armpits or lightly touching your backs we will push onward, chanting, this is what poetry looks like, this is what poetry feels like, this is what poetry smells like. We want to take all the forms and whimsies and all the meters and stanzas and all the calls for revolution and love and gargle and spit with them and as we spit let us likewise secrete a mucus from tiny glands on our back that will feed the bacteria from the fungus and from that make a fleece-like covering on our back to provide us a degree of insulation so we can rest our tail end near the hydrothermal vents of their thoughts which spurt out at 176 degrees. And yes, we very well might have gas, nausea, and vomiting; we might be shaking the entire time; we might have concentration problems, joint pain, loss of appetite, neck pain, sinus infection, and sensitivity to the sun; might have nipple discharge, breast swelling, or primary malignant breast neoplasm; and yes we might have an increased incidence of malformation, such as a short tail or short body or vertebral disorganization; and we might display bizarre behavior, agitation, or depersonalization, and complex behaviors such as “sleep driving” after ingestion of a sedative-hypnotic. But nonetheless, despite such side effects and the constant struggles to overcome them, do not doubt for a moment that we will stick chickens in our cunts with you and walk without hesitation or shame out of 24-hour grocery stores to the concrete parking lots where we will all eat together with friends and children and the grocery store baggers and all the stray animals drawn by the scent of liberated meat marinated in the sweet tang of pirate pussy, even as the vegetarians among us might playfully admonish the cuntbasters and chicken-tasters by applying parking-lot weed garnishes to our ears and buttocks and overturning grocery carts upon themselves to perform agitprop street theater reenactments of the conditions at industrial poultry farms. And if meanwhile we allow ourselves to be seduced into separating ourselves from each other via a thousand distractions and enticements, remind us to continue to travel together in a cloud as if we are the companions of the always-moving shark, and let us suck against sharkskin and eat shark feces. And if they try to take forms of knowledge from us, the trans-species companionship and herbal cures and homegrown kombucha and hypnotherapy scripts and the passwords to online membership in the Radical Riot Porn collective and our favorite pharmaceutical cocktail recipes, they will have to come take them from the small sacks hidden beneath the uniforms they make us wear, the dresses, the petticoats, the stockings, the girdles, the garters, the Spanx, the four-inch heels that push out our butts and jut out our breasts. And when they have offered us free downloads of movies in which characters are unable to connect because they are too depressed and their depression makes them unable to share anything with anyone, then despite the fact that some of us might find ourselves humming along with the demographically appropriate soundtrack of such entertainments, we want to remember that we can get up and wander out and instead lend our energies to the gigantic productions being rehearsed right outside our windows, preenactments of general strikes yet to come, with hundreds of thousands of participants who refuse to pay for art and refuse to be paid for art but still demand to make and experience art, and let us make of the collective labor and solidarity that will have to have been sweated out in the often and inevitably disharmonious entanglements a model for revolutionary methods of falling in love. And when they tell us to just calm down and have a good time, let us surprise even ourselves as we enjoy our guilt and complicity so much that as we cum we whisper into your ears our astronomical resource-usage statistics, 19.5 acres, 19.5 acres, 19.5 acres. Let this fucking happen not just in the man-and-woman doggy-style used in the “Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!” action but also in the various woman-and-woman and man-and-man styles and trans-and-man and trans-and-woman styles and trans-and-trans styles and also in numerous other combinations, such as the Lucky Pierre–style so beloved by poets thanks to Frank O’Hara. And let us do this with you free of harassment and gender- normative narratives so that if you say, no, I prefer not to, we will listen, and if we say, no, we prefer not to, we will listen, just as if you say, let this arousal lead us to the new techniques we will also listen and if all are game we will writhe furiously from these positions. And we will have no numbers trouble regarding the equitable distribution of orgasms among all the genders and all the critters, while at the same time reminding each other with our actions and our attentions that while our orgasms may be robust and bountiful we will feel equally loved and replenished by acts of care, wit, and the soft caressing of skin and pelt, just as we will have to have found new words for cumming as we rewire our erogenous circuits such that we find sexual bliss with works of art. That’s right, we want art that makes us wet and driven, driven to flail and whelp and court failure in our impulse to action, again and again, failing with ever more grace and cunning, until futility becomes the magic that when dissolved beneath the tongue of all those ready to bark leads to ever more fruitful inquiries, for our bodies are bored by answers, which is why we wish to striate and rejuvenate the questions, even if in our questioning some of us are led to then ask how might we refuse this, refuse all of this. But know that we will be there with you, still, with your refusal, with our refusal. And if your refusal demands seemingly senseless acts of art, we will rush to the nearest public plazas and help turn over the police cars out front, rock them with a back-and-forth motion and then when overturned we will mount and simulate parodic acts of lovemaking with you, the rushers and rockers among us will do this together because it takes five or six, lovers or not, to overturn a police car, sometimes seven if its tank is still full of not-yet-ignited gasoline distilled from the finest international oil. Regardless, such acts can’t be done alone or in isolation, just as it is often difficult to pull the needles out alone or in isolation or to build a giant worker-run counter-factory made of Legos amid the roller coaster and other giant amusement rides in the central court of the Mall of America, fitting plastic piece into plastic piece in order to construct a gigantic Constructivist fantasia of interlocking reds and blacks, within which artists and lovers can hide in plain sight, stealing power from the Gap on the second floor and using crumbs from the food court to feed the hopeful monsters training for what will have become a new breed of revolutionary lovemaking mall rats, fueled by Orange Julius and the hive-buzz of fluorescent lighting, scurrying into the night armed with erect and pulsing genitalia and brains on permanent holiday sale, shouting, we are smashing up the present because we come from the future and cannot run hot and wild without having released the colts. We want to have done this with you. To have carried babies inside us to manifold protests and actions, and after they come out, to have held them fast to us as we eat chicken with the grocery store baggers, our breasts full of milk, and to let anyone who wants to suck at them, as the chemicals we produce will provide healthy and complementary amino acids to our feasting, strengthening the immune system for the viruses to come, with or without the feelings of comfort or excitability on the giving or receiving ends, and if whether on the giving or on the receiving end of such suckling any one of us begin to blush from embarrassment, out of fear that such exchanges might be reenacting clichéd and problematic tropes of idealized motherhood or the sexualizing of adult nursing or the exploited domestic and reproductive labor of child-rearing women or the gratuitous titillations of public breastfeeding among North Americans, we will pause and wipe our milk moustaches and feeling the heat in our cheeks and buck ourselves up, for there is no shame in the free and consensual sharing of resources or in the complicated emotions such sharing can frequently elicit in zones of temporary erogeny. And if some of the milk drips and dribbles onto the ground, splashing in with the dripping cunt-chicken juices and yellow-white blister pus and tick-nipple discharge, we will not be surprised in the least to find our ranks swelling further with the plush and the furried, the winged and the clawed, the nightbeasts with their quivering snouts leading them to the feast. And look, here among us now, jackrabbits nibbling on rotten apple cores and mountain lions and red-winged blackbirds falling from the sky and demented panda bears drifting on broken-off ice-shelves, and leopards, red foxes, kangaroos, feral cats spitting in the night, wild dogs and horses, horses, horses, horses, all holding us upside down so as to hypnotize us and then using the forefinger and middle finger to press down the vent area just in front of our anus so as to make our sex organs protrude, and then fingering these gently as we write furiously from this position.

And then maybe just then will be heard a dank vibration, halfway between hum and roar, gurgling up from the tangle of nerves that thread round our guts, our first brains brewing in intestinal funk, then up and out the throat, the invisible sound waves resonating between each animal body, twisting into feedback loops of blistering distortion within and among all the raw mammalian feelers, coursing through the circuits, each meridian charged up with electrified chi. Yes, that just happened, we are materialists who read horoscopes and poets who say chi, freed from constriction and habit, from impasse and defeat, from all that says no inside of us, from all that has been done in our name and still shits out of us, with or without clumps of it ever sticking in our fur so that we will never forget, so that now in the variable buzz of all in consort, tone poems coalescing into tenfold operatics, the fibers of all muscles rippling with the ground tremors of the high-heeled work-booted parade, with leaping and grasping, with or without eye contact, with or without the holding of hands or the light touching of the back or the front, all pressed up against the sweet metallic smell of our entanglement, group-flesh groping ever toward something greater than ourselves, because an army of lovers cannot fail, and with chins up and chests out, bursting forth from the ground into all directions, fists lifted, a thousand middle fingers thrust up in pride and vigor, for all tomorrow’s parties today, in heat and in fury, nostrils flaring, each as each can and as each desires, shoulders to it now, leaning over what will have had to have been done to become that which we cannot yet dare envision beyond the sweet taste of it on our moist upper lips—